Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Multi-dimensional blogging

by

[This post was written on Friday but some glitch stopped it from actually posting when I thought it was posted, so here it is, only slightly yellowed with age:}

It’s taken me a little while to figure out what Dave Winer has been up to this past week with his redesign of Scripting News, the site that taught so many of us how versatile the blog form could be. I think I get it now.

A lot of the comments he’s elicited have focused on the outre Amsterdam red-light-district photo that has replaced his time-honored cactus. But that’s just, as it were, the window-dressing. (As of now, Monday, that picture is already gone — I guess that image will change periodically, which is a nice touch.)

At first it seemed like Winer was just adding a bunch of categories to his blog. And hey, that didn’t seem so revolutionary — Radio Userland, Movable Type and lots of blogging tools already allow that.

But the changes now feel more ambitious than that. Dave is placing each of his blog posts into a hierarchical outline or directory. (This shouldn’t be a big surprise — Winer’s signature software product was an outliner.)

So, basically, with this new approach, each new post to his blog is now being fed into two alternative navigation systems: the chronological mode blogs all share (“Find post by date”) and a new outline/directory mode that seems new to the blog world (though obviously it’s omnipresent on the Web). In other words, every blog post is now contributing not only to a diary-like timeline but also to a Yahoo-like knowledge base.

I imagine there are other things going on here beneath the surface, but this alone seems pretty neat to me.

Blog vs. blog

by

John Markoff of the New York Times is one of the smartest and most respected tech reporters around. He’s also seen a lot of trends boom and bust. I didn’t take his comments in an OJR interview to be as dismissive of the phenomenon of blogging as many of my fellow bloggers have. Markoff said:

  I certainly can see that scenario, where all these new technologies may only be good enough to destroy all the old standards but not create something better to replace them with. I think that’s certainly one scenario. The other possibility right now — it sometimes seems we have a world full of bloggers and that blogging is the future of journalism, or at least that’s what the bloggers argue, and to my mind, it’s not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio. And, you know, give it five or 10 years and see if any institutions emerge out of it. It’s possible that in the end there may be some small subset of people who find a livelihood out of it and that the rest of the people will find that, you know, keeping their diaries online is not the most useful thing to with their time. When I tell that to people … they get very angry with me. …

I think he’s right to suggest that it’s going to take 5 to 10 years before we know whether blogging will actually have a lasting impact on institutional journalism. Like most journalistic pros, though, he sets professional criteria: he assumes the yardstick is going to be, can anyone “find a livelihood” from blogging, and do “any institutions emerge out of it.”

But like so many other Web phenomena, blogging may prove significant despite a failure to prove itself as a business. Institutions and livelihoods is not the point here. We already have a class of professional journalists. It does certain things quite well. It fails to serve many other needs. Blogs are something different. They are not displacing professional journalism but rather complementing it.

In one of those great fortuitous juxtapositions of blog-postings that we sometimes witness, on the same day as Markoff’s interview hit the Web, Jay Rosen chose to unveil an extremely pithy and useful list of “Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism”.

The whole list is worth reading, but let’s zero in on point number one: “The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.” Pros live in the market economy and have a very hard time with this concept. And American culture uses dollars as the only yardstick of seriousness and significance, so stuff that is not measurable by that yardstick tends to evoke puzzlement or dismissal.

This is one of the things I tried to emphasize in my comments at Bloggercon: Online phenomena do not have to make money to be of value to people. Blogs can change individual lives — and even, conceivably, the world, in some way — without needing business models and marketing machines. In fact, what makes them unusual to many who produce and consume them is precisely that they are not simply another retread of the media business.

So while I understand, and to some extent share, John Markoff’s sense of deja vu as he surveys the blogscape — yes, sometimes it really does sound a lot like 1993-1994 out there — I don’t think that blogs are doomed to recapitulate the early Web’s cycle of starry-eyed idealism fueling insane visions of wealth collapsing into financial wreckage. If we remember the past we should not be condemned to repeat it, right? This is why my hackles go up when I hear about schemes to turn blogs into Big Businesses. That way madness lies.

Monday notes

by

Bloggercon was fun. I saw some old friends, met some people in person who I’d only known by their writing, and got to chew on some toothsome ideas.

I think that my panel probably could have gone on for two more hours — felt like we just barely scratched the surface — but there were lots of other people who had as much or more that needed to be said. At this sort of conference, the distinction between who’s at the podium and who’s in the crowd is pretty meaningless — a room full of bloggers is a room full of people with a lot to say.

Other people took tons of notes if you want to follow some of the conversation (though keep in mind these transcripts are pretty rough — I’ve seen a few things here and there that I know are mistaken!). Dan Bricklin took some great pictures.

I’ve got more to say but it’s going to dribble out through the week, I think. Too much other work right now…

Presidential blogging

by

One of the highlights of the sessions here at Bloggercon yesterday was the panel of presidential-campaign bloggers. Here we had lead bloggers for the Dean campaign, the Clark campaign, and the Democratic National Committee — along with a bright-faced 19-year-old volunteer for the Graham campaign. These folks are all central figures in the struggle to drag the world of political campaigns, in some cases kicking and screaming, into the Internet era.

In their own camps I have no doubt that these folks are the resident idealists, pushing their colleagues toward a better understanding of how online tools can make the political process more open, direct and engaging. But at this conference, surrounded by people who passionately believe that blogs are changing the entire universe, I think these campaign bloggers were a little surprised to find themselves cast as the pragmatists, the realists.

When Esther Dyson asked whether the campaign blogs had any impact on, or even discussions about, actual policy as opposed to campaign news and promotion, Joe Jones of the Graham campaign declared, with charming bluntness, that no one cares about policy, and of course blogs were all about PR and buzz.

The panelists were asked, what real-world impact is the Net actually having? And Mathew Gross of the Dean campaign reported that, while George Bush is raising millions in big-denomination contributions from well-heeled supporters, Dean is raising equivalent millions in small donations from a much, much larger number of supporters.

Money raised is usually considered the ultimate yardstick of campaign success. But conference organizer Dave Winer pushed the speakers: Weren’t they just using the Internet to raise money to buy TV ads? Why take money from the bright new distributed world of the Net only to feed it back into the Big Media machine? Why couldn’t the candidates commit to responding to one question from blog visitors every day? (Josh Marshall gently told the crowd that they simply didn’t understand how crazed the candidates’ schedules were.) The candidates were taking from the Net, but what were they giving back?

I think the panelists were all flummoxed by this line of questioning; they are used to trying to justify their seemingly quixotic online techniques by pointing to hardnosed results. Instead, they were being charged with playing the same old political games while paying lip-service to the notion of online participation.

I consider myself about 60/40 on the idealism/pragmatism scale, but all I could think was, get real. TV still controls American politics. No one is going to get elected in the U.S. today without spending millions on TV advertising. If you care about getting your candidate elected — or you care, as all these Democrats did, about seeing Bush defeated — then you’d be foolish and irresponsible to pretend that this is not reality.

It would be great to see that reality change someday, and maybe the kind of innovation exemplified by campaign blogging will help make the change happen. That won’t occur in the course of a single election. In the meantime, money still talks, and Dean’s success raising money through the Net is an extraordinary development, worth celebrating in itself. Dean may be using his blog — and the Net — as a means to an end; he is more interested in getting elected than in making an abstract point about online people power. To me, the 2004 election is too important to be used as a
testing ground for a new theory. Pragmatism should rule.

A little fact is a dangerous thing

by

Since I’m talking on Saturday at BloggerCon about blogs and journalism, I’ve been thinking about what seems to me to be the central issue in this field: trust. Here is a semi-formed essay — consider it a sort of notes-in-progress.

Three weeks ago, reading a New York Times “Political Memo” piece (9/7/03) by Adam Nagourney, my eyes scanned the following sentence: “Perpetuating a widely circulated myth, a senior adviser to a Dean rival recently sent an e-mail message saying, ‘You do know that he is the Dean of Dean Witter, don’t you?’ He is not.”

It was the “He is not” that grabbed me: Its definitive tone. Its absence of attribution (no linking to supporting evidence possible in a newspaper, of course). Its assumption that the reader would simply accept its assertion. And my own willingness as a reader to accept it.

Because I did, the first time I read the piece. I trusted it. I didn’t ask, “Sez who? How do you know? Why should I trust you?” Which are the questions I would almost certainly have asked had I found such a statement on a Web page. I trusted it based on my years of experience reading the Times, on my faith in its still-formidable (Jayson Blair affair notwithstanding) editing apparatus, on my belief that the people who work at the Times are (mostly) devoted to getting the facts right.

But then I started wondering. And I got curious for myself. So I started poking around, using the same search tools available to everyone. And this is what I found.

If you search Google for “Howard Dean Witter” you will find a profusion of blogs and pages posted by people who don’t like Dean saying snide things about how he’s the Dean of Dean Witter. Many of them point to an August column by Jimmy Breslin which asserts that “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street.” Comments posted here and there by Dean supporters challenge this statement by pointing out that Dean Witter is not a firm founded by Messrs. Dean and Witter; rather, a guy named Dean (first name) Witter (last name) gave his name to the company when he founded it in 1924.

Ahh — so Breslin got this wrong, the anti-Dean bloggers spread the bad meme, then others corrected the record, and Nagourney closed the case, right?

Not so fast. If you keep poking through the factual detritus on the Web you eventually find that Howard Brush Dean Jr., the candidate’s late father (he died in 2001), was a successful stockbroker. And Time reports that the firm he worked for, and indeed was a “top executive” at, was none other than Dean Witter (known at that point in its corporate evolution as Dean Witter Reynolds).

Assuming that Time can be trusted on that, as far as I can tell, we have the following facts:
*Howard Dean’s Deans are not the Deans who founded Dean Witter; BUT
*Howard Dean’s father was a top executive at Dean Witter.

In other words, Breslin and Nagourney were both technically accurate. Breslin’s statement “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street” seems factually contradictory to Nagourney’s flat-out dismissal of the “myth” that “he is the Dean of Dean Witter.” But it is quite likely — unless I have completely bungled this little inquiry — that both are right.

The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions on Dr. Dean for his stockbrokerly upbringing. My point is that facts in political debate are always at the service of perspective. “Facts all come with points of view,” as David Byrne sang 20 years ago. Facts are not the endpoint but rather the starting point for a political argument. But too often — among bloggers like everywhere else — we use them as a way to close off debate. “You’re wrong,” we say; or, worse, “you’re lying.”

We like to cordon off “fact” from “opinion” in our brains, but there is no bright sharp line between them. A fact can mislead depending on what other facts it is or is not juxtaposed with. (Jay Rosen has a good piece about this in relation to the hoary question of whether blogs are reporting or opinion.) Opinions need facts to give them persuasive heft, but facts need opinions to give them meaning. We all have lots of both. It’s how we integrate them that counts.

One way of defining honesty is this: Honesty is the quality of accepting new facts even when they run against your opinions. And that quality is what earns trust — whether you’re a professional journalist, a blogger, or any combination thereof.

Editors vs. bloggers

by

So,, thanks to the controversy about Sacramento Bee columnist/blogger Dan Weintraub, there is now a growing discussion about whether blogs appearing as part of a larger journalistic institution’s enterprise should be edited. (For independent blogs, it’s not really an issue — they are generally one-person operations anyway.)

As an editor and a blogger, I find that the perspectives on this tend to fall into two camps talking past each other.

Bloggers and those who view blogging as a genuine new online form decry the notion that blogs should be edited; they prize the un-mediated spontaneity of the unedited blog, and believe that editing is contrary to the very heart of the blogging enterprise. Editing in a true blog happens live, in public, in a continuous dialogue between the blogger and his or her readers (and other bloggers).

Many professional journalists (people who earn their living by reporting, writing or editing) scoff at this. They have been trained in an ethos according to which no one is above editing; even when editors-in-chief writes something, somebody else edits it before it’s published. So when these journalists hear bloggers saying, “We don’t need no stinkin’ editors!,” what they hear is a claim of privilege, and their response is to think, “Buddy, who do you think you are? Everyone gets edited!”

My heart is with both of these perspectives; I think they’re both right. Great editors make for great journalism, and many editors have rescued many writers and many publications. Blogs, however, are something different, and they do benefit from presenting the unfiltered, warts-and-all perspective of an individual.

We are getting into trouble, I think, because blogs have acquired some small amount of buzz and excitement, and media organizations are jumping on the bandwagon, but in the process they are aping the superficial qualities of blogs and failing to embrace their essence. If a blog were just “short items organized in reverse chronological order,” every newsroom has one already — it’s called the wire feed. And that, sadly, is what some media operations are now providing as they try to bring blogs into their universe. (Just compare CNet’s “Wi-Fi Journal” to Glenn Fleishman’s Wi-Fi blog to understand the difference.) Meanwhile, when a newspaper actually puts a real blog in the hands of a writer, as the Sac Bee apparently did with Weintraub, editors freak out and other reporters get jealous. It can be done — Dan Gillmor has been doing it for a long time now — but it’s not easy.

A newspaper or magazine editor considering what to do about blogs can either say, “This is an experiment, go, blog, you don’t need an editor,” and make that clear to the readers, and persuade the newspaper’s lawyers to relax. (That last bit is probably the hardest.) Or she could say, “Look, blogs are great, but they’re not what we do.” If it were me, what I’d probably do is encourage my reporters to keep blogs in their spare time. (The union would probably not be happy with that, however.)

But I wouldn’t waste my time trying to push blogs back into the old template of the newsroom. The world is richer for the existence of well-edited newspapers and unedited blogs. I want them both — they complement each other nicely. And there’s no reason we can’t have both. What we don’t need is the same old news product in new blog-shaped bottles.

Seybold post mortem

by

Had a nice time talking at Seybold yesterday to a strangely sparse crowd (was it the bomb threat the day before? was it too late in the day? is Seybold dead? or was it just that the world is a lot less excited about RSS and blogs than we think?). Shared the podium with CNET’s John Roberts and Matt May. We agreed that RSS and blogs were highly unlikely to radically transform commercial publishing but that both were valuable, important tools.

I argued that it’s silly to talk about blogs “killing” print — that we keep getting stuck in a loop every time a new news distribution technology comes along, asking, will this “kill” its predecessor? Radio didn’t kill print, TV didn’t kill radio, the Net didn’t kill TV, and blogs won’t kill anything. Each new medium forces its predecessors to rethink what they do, and sometimes to revamp their business structures. Blogs are a fantastic way for individuals to enter the global conversation on the Net, to comment on the news and sometimes to break some news themselves. They don’t have to become Big Business to be important.

Steve Gillmor and Sam Ruby were there, and Christian Crumlish of RFB, and Steve Rhodes… and probably other bloggers who I didn’t recognize by face. It really should have just been a group discussion — when 25 people are in a hall designed for hundreds and three people are up on a stage it’s just not a very comfortable feeling.

The whole conference seemed that way — the Moscone West facility, which I’d never been in before even though it’s just down the street from Salon’s office, features vast lofty lobbies that make you feel small and insignificant, and if a conference isn’t positively bustling with energy there’s a pervading sense of forlornness. In a game effort to use some of the empty floorspace someone with a sense of humor had set up impromptu bocce courts on the industrial carpeting of the second-floor lobby. One guy was even playing, and seemed to know what he was doing.

Loaded questions

by

The Online Journalism Review is running an interesting set of interviews with “online journalism pioneers” in whose number your humble blogger was included. Curiously, the first part of my response to one of the questions was omitted, so here it is for you:

OJR: Should information online be free, or should publishers try to squeeze out money from consumers?

SR: That’s a pretty loaded way of phrasing the question! With my bias from my experience here at Salon, I’d instead ask, “Is there any feasible model for supporting independent journalism online besides obtaining the support of a mega-corporation?”

Unclear on the concept

by

One of the motivating notions of the blogging movement is the idea that blogs put individuals — including business executives — directly in touch with one another, bypassing layers of middle-people. That’s the idea, anyway. Or you can hire a PR person to send email to bloggers saying that you “read their blogs regularly” and “wonder if they’d be open” to you “posting an opinion.”

Both Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe — along with who knows how many other bloggers (not me, though!) — were recently on the receiving end of such an email. Clueless PR efforts are an ineradicable fact of life, and pointing out that said executive would have served himself far more effectively by popping these bloggers a quick email of his own — or posting comments on their sites himself — isn’t going to change the entrenched business practice of “have my secretary/PR person/other flunky do it for me.”

What’s most amusing about this incident is that Kapor, in a gentlemanly way, hid the identity of both the executive and the PR firm in question — but others in the comments to his post took key phrases from the PR letter and used Google to nail down exactly who exec in question seems to be.

Matters of public record

by

There’s a fascinating dispute in the blogosphere right now that is worth talking about beyond the emotions of the personalities involved, because it touches on a substantive issue: What is the public record of the Web and of blogs?

Dave Winer writes Scripting News, has developed some key blogging software tools (including Radio Userland, which I use for this blog and which Salon Blogs uses), and is now a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. Scripting News is a widely read and influential blog — partly because Dave’s been at it a really long time, partly because he updates it a lot, but mostly, I think, because he is adept at letting the full span of his professional and personal worlds spill out into his blogging. Dave’s life really is an open book, and in demonstrating how to do that he has contributed enormously to all of our understanding of what we do here on the Web.

Dave and a number of other high-profile software developers have recently been engaged in a very public and (to outsiders) arcane dispute over the future of RSS, the protocol most blogs use to syndicate their content. I’m not going to weigh in on that issue, partly because I have neither the expertise nor the time to figure out exactly what I think but mostly because I don’t wish to add to the noise.

Meanwhile, however — whether as a result of that dispute or for other reasons, I don’t know — Mark Pilgrim, who has a highly regarded site that focuses on Web design issues, has begun a site called “Winer Watcher,” subtitled, “What did Dave edit today?” He’s written a script that grabs Scripting News every five minutes, and he’s posting the revisions that Dave makes to his blogs, so that you can see successive versions of Dave’s posts. Dave has asked Mark to stop, and as far as I can see, as I write this, Mark has refused.

The whole thing is now turning to the question of whether Mark is using too much of Dave’s bandwidth, and whether Mark’s republishing of Dave’s writing is fair use or not, but neither of these questions is what interests me here.

To me, this disagreement highlights one of the continuing, unresolved questions about Web publishing. We know that a Web page is simply a file on a server, and that files are totally mutable. The only thing that keeps something “published” on the Web once it is first published is the publisher’s continued choice to leave the file, unchanged, on his server. Some people view their sites as the bits-and-pixels equivalent to paper publishing, and try to keep as fixed a record as they can of how pages looked and read at the moment they were first published (at Salon we maintain an archive server that allows you to find the original, often creative designs of our earlier issues). Other people view their sites as the Webly equivalent of live improv — the site is an everchanging thing; you can’t step in the same river twice (yes Google has a cache, but it expires; and yes, there’s the Internet Archive, but it doesn’t scrape any site every five minutes!).

As a journalistic enterprise, at Salon we’ve always understood that there is a temptation to futz with what you’ve published, particularly to cover your tracks if you’ve goofed. We’ve tried to resist this temptation; if we make a tiny error that does not bear on the substance of an article (misspell a word or a name) we will simply correct it; but if we fix a substantive error after a story has been published, we will post a correction notice, note that the story has been corrected on the story itself, and link the story to the correction notice.

But Salon is a newsroom: we edit everything we publish and we behave like a journalistic organization. A personal blog is another kind of beast. There is no editor. There is — at least as blogging is most widely practiced today — mostly opinion, not fact. Corrections are less of an issue.

As I understand the way Dave Winer blogs, he posts constantly through the day and revises quite a bit; by the end of the day he’s finished the product, it gets sent out to those who receive it by e-mail, and that’s that. So he’s exposing his editing process to his readers, by choice. I don’t begrudge him this method of working.

In traditional journalism, we produce a piece of writing, get it edited, assure ourselves that it’s ready to be published, and then we release it to the world. Part of what makes blogging different is that it’s more impulsive, less polished, less filtered. This is fundamentally a good thing. But as a result it’s only natural that some bloggers may feel a desire to keep re-editing their stuff even after it’s live.

In my blog, I prefer to post and then, if I need to fix something, fix it by posting a new item making reference to the old one, rather than by outright revisions. But my style of working has been shaped by 20 years in newsrooms. Dave has a different modus operandi; he’s open about it, and it seems to work for him.

I’m not sure why we’re supposed to be upset by the revisions that the “Winer Watcher” exposes. So what if Winer sometimes makes a statement that he later chooses to retract? This isn’t presidential diplomacy. Yes, blogs are creating a public record, but they are also highly personal records. And we’re each going to approach the recording process in our own way.

If a blogger made a practice of going back deep into his archives and messing around with old posts, I’d consider that a shame — not because he’d somehow betrayed his public but because he was in a sense betraying himself. But if Dave Winer wants to view each day’s Weblog posts as works-in-progress for the day, it seems like a reasonable practice, and one that doesn’t deserve to be pursued with an obsessive eye.